An appended phantom record is marked as "loaded" intentionally because the "loaded" field determines whether or not the proxy will attempt to load the record's children when it is expanded. Since a newly created phantom record should not yet have any children stored on the server, we set "loaded" to true when it is appended so that it does not attempt to load when expanded.

I can't imagine a case where you would need to load children for a phantom record. Are you creating a record client-side that is assumed to have children server-side? If so, you could either assign it an id when it is created, or set its "loaded" field back to false after appending it. I'm not sure either solution is really desirable. Could you provide more details as to exactly what you're trying to accomplish here?